interactive, semi-autonomous technological artifact, musical automaton, machine musician and improviser

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(Cork, Ireland—Mar 31 2010) A unique and exciting on-stage meeting between human and machine improvisers takes place on 26 May 2010 at Blackrock Castle Observatory (Cork, Ireland). This event will mark the debut of two extraordinary machine musicians, io 0.0.1 beta++ and iWife constructed by Han-earl Park and John Godfrey respectively. Featuring Park and Godfrey (guitars), Bruce Coates and Franziska Schroeder (saxophones), and Francis Heery (diffusion), the performance will be part critique and part playful exploration, both a boundary-breaking public demonstration of socio-musical technologies and an ironic sci-fi parody.

io 0.0.1 beta++ and iWife are modern-day musical automata. They are not instruments to be played, but non-human artificial musicians that perform alongside their human counterparts. They represent contrasting approaches to the artistic investigation of technology, interaction, improvisation, and musicality itself. io 0.0.1 beta++ whimsically evokes a 1950s B-movie robot, seemingly jerry-rigged, constructed from ad-hoc components including plumbing, kitchenware, speakers and missile switches. While io 0.0.1 beta++ celebrates the material and corporeal, iWife, in contrast, is disembodied and delocalized; a diffuse ghost in acoustic space.

The performances with these artificial musicians will highlight society’s entanglement with technology, demonstrate alternative modes of interfacing the musical and the technological, and illuminate the creative and improvisative processes in music. With the simultaneously high-tech and Frankensteinian backdrop of Blackrock Castle Observatory, the event will be a radical and playful engagement with powerful and problematic dreams (and nightmares) of the artificial; a dream as old as the anthropology of robots.

With (human) performers representing diverse traditions and practices of present-day, transnational improvised musics (from avant jazz, free improvisation, AACM and post-AACM practices, European and Euro-American experimental musics), expect musical improvisations that fuse, fragment and recombine musical histories, traditions and expectations.

The event will begin at 8:00 pm (doors at 7:45 pm). Tickets are €16 (€10 concessions) from www.tickets.ie

Presented with funding from the Music Network Performance and Touring Award, and support from the Arts Council of Ireland, Blackrock Castle Observatory, The Castle Bar and Trattoria and the UCC School of Music.

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